Walls

I came out of the most ordinary of ordinary families. Middle class. Jewish. A 1950’s family: my father a retail storeowner, my mother a housewife.

I went to only one elementary school, one junior high school, one high school. I wore angora anklets and Peter Pan collars just like everyone else. I played with dolls: paper dolls, storybook dolls, kewpie dolls, bride dolls. The dolls were always beautiful, always girls, always going out on dates with imaginary boys who were very handsome.

I read sports novels but never played sports. I was never left at home with a babysitter the whole time I was growing up. I got married to the first man who asked me and had a big wedding at a famous old hotel.

I left every decision to my husband. I baked the cakes, raised the child, cleaned the house, worked for extra money. I knew I’d be married my whole life.

At the age of 34 I said I can’t take the pain any longer and I left.

 

There never were earthquakes when I was married. It was calm, too calm for years, and then pain, for more years. Couples came to dinner. We moved several times. We had a child. I was in my twenties and then my early thirties. He went back to school to learn a new occupation. We worked, saved money, went to movies, fought once in a while.

Mostly there was silence, a silence I never noticed because I didn’t know there was any other way. A long silence punctuated by loud, high-pitched screams. It’s a good thing I didn’t notice either the silence or the screams because I wasn’t ready to do anything about them anyway.

The Wave

It is September 1973. Every year I have gone back to work in September, but not this year. My husband, unhappy with his job, has suddenly decided we are moving to a suburban area one hundred miles away.

Suburb. Sub-urb. Not quite urban. Not quite city. Lower than a city? I have seen the suburbs from the freeway and all I see are houses and shopping centers. Surely there must be more than that. Surely there must be theatres, museums, parks, playgrounds, old homes and little shops to wander through. Surely there must be many things to take the place of the job I am leaving behind, and the graduate school and the friends and the political work. There must be all those things to make up for the beach and the climate and the little home I love. But there aren’t.

There are only walls. Blocks and blocks of cinder block walls. Ten cinder blocks high. One city block long and wide. There is no rhythm to the walls. No graceful swaying like the fronds of palm trees or the twirls of dancers bending to each other. Just cinder block walls up and down as far as I can see, enclosing houses I can only imagine and life I never see. All the same color and design but no sign of life anywhere, not human nor animal nor plant life, not on the roofs of course but not even on the narrow sidewalks adjacent to the walls.

I want to see life inside the walls, life on the streets. I want to see that people care for more than having the shiniest newest model car, the largest screen TV set, and the most gold chains. I want to see life everywhere and all I see are fifty square miles of cinder block walls, regular cross streets, and an occasional giant shopping center.

 

I wasn’t reading the newspapers, but somewhere, days after it happened, I heard that Salvador Allende had died. I read the newspapers then, listened to the news and heard about the military coup in Chile, heard about the many people dead. It didn’t register until years later that the number was 30,000.

It was over very quickly in the press. They reported the facts. Salvador Allende was the Marxist president of Chile. He had taken control of privately owned land, expropriated the copper mines. Massive strikes had crippled his regime. A military coup overthrew his government. He died in the National Palace in Santiago on September 11, 1973. The newspapers said it was suicide.

I could not read the accounts. I hated the way they talked about him. As if he was a criminal, had done something wrong by introducing land reform and taking control of Chile’s copper mines. As if he was just another leader of another Latin American country whose government is regularly overturned by a military coup. The newspapers didn’t say that Chile had been a democracy for two hundred years. Not one word was said about Allende’s long constitutional struggle to win the presidency. No one talked of his humanity. The media covered the story for a few days and then it was over. Alone in the suburbs, I met no one who cared. No one ever mentioned it to me, not my neighbors, nor my husband, nor the clerks in the store nor my son’s pre-school teacher.

I cared. I had written a long paper about Allende in the best class I had ever taken in college. The class was politics in Latin America and the professor was young and inexperienced and he wanted us to investigate what interested us. I researched my topic for months and when I was finished, I wrote a forty page paper. I concluded that Salvador Allende would not be overthrown by a military coup. There was no military tradition to do that. And I looked forward to seeing the effect of his government on Chile, on Latin America, on the United States.

I never knew until later of the spontaneous outpouring of music and art that accompanied his regime. I never knew people painted the walls of their houses with bright colors and musical groups sang lyrics of hope. I never knew there was a feeling in the barriadas, the slums that make up the majority of the Latin American cities, that something was moving, changing. Allende was confronting the problems of poverty and disease. I only knew the book-facts of land reform and expropriation of copper mines and Chile’s democratic tradition and I loved Salvador Allende.

 

My favorite movie is “Last Tango in Paris.” In it, a middle-aged man and a young woman meet as strangers in a Paris apartment. Minutes after their first encounter, they make love violently, passionately. They leave, live their lives on the outside, come back again and again for four days. They are brutal, loving, compassionate, vicious with each other.

It is not a romance. They are not going to live happily ever after. He refuses to know her name or tell her his. She is engaged to a man her own age. His wife has just committed suicide by slashing her wrists in the bathtub. He has just discovered she was a whore. She was beautiful. He loved her.

In the last scenes of the movie, the man decides he wants the young woman. He follows her through Paris to a hall where the mannequin-like dancers are tracing the steps of a highly stylized tango. He declares his love for her, runs after her, follows her to her apartment. There, face to face, he demands to know her name. As she tells him, she shoots him in the stomach. A moment later, he dies.

It is September, 1973. I see “Last Tango in Paris” and become violently ill.

 

Ralph Harris was fat. His flowered shirt pulled tight around his chest. He was shaped like a pear and his skin was the color of that autumn fruit — pale, flecked with brown — and he was juicy like an over-ripe yellow pear. When I’d have to hug him in greeting, I felt like he was watering all over me. When his wife and I became friends, she confided one day how she hated to make love to him because he sweated so much when he came.

Frances, Ralph’s wife, was skinny, not Vogue-skinny, but Oklahoma dust-bowl skinny, like a Dorothea Lange photograph. Close to the bone she was, honest. She admitted she did not love Ralph. She did not even like him, but they had two children so she stayed with him. The daughter, a two-year old, wore diapers and had a continual chronic diaper rash that inflamed her buttocks and vagina in red open sores. Their young son always had a runny nose.

Like us, the Harrises were new to the suburbs and were lonely. Frances had left her lover behind, vowing she would not get entangled in another affair. She was going to work on the marriage. That resolve didn’t last long. Soon they were telling us about group sex, wife-swapping, screwing standing up, sitting down, in swimming pools, jacuzzis, in redwood hot tubs, on mattresses on floors of small tract houses or in the homes of the rich, with two, three, or four men and women or just one, while the other partner watched or didn’t. Frances preferred a relationship with one man at a time. Ralph had no preference at all. We saw them once a week for dinner. They were our only friends the whole year.

 

The night I moved into the den I wrapped myself up in my favorite blanket, hugged my knees to my chest and smiled. I laughed out loud like a child who has finally gotten what she wanted after making a terrible scene. I hugged myself very tight and I wasn’t afraid. Which was curious because the night before, I had told my husband, “If this doesn’t get any better, I think we’d better separate,” hoping he would say, “I love you, we’ll work it out,” or “I can’t live without you. It will get better,” or “We have a child, let’s keep trying.” He didn’t say any of these things. He said, “Yes, I think you’re right.”

And I ran off to a class I had nearly forgotten. And when I returned, our son was asleep, and we had to get up for work the next morning and what was there to say anyway?

We went to bed. I rolled over next to him and said, “I’m so afraid,” and he said, “I am too.” And we both cried. And then we made love for the last time and it was for comfort and sharing and while we made love it was like the first few months we were married when we lived in the small apartment with the used furniture and I trusted him. I felt that kind of love for him and I cried for a while and then I went to sleep and I dreamed.

I am in a school bus, an ordinary yellow school bus. The bus goes through a huge wave which looms up on either side of us, threateningly, menacingly. The water parts to let us through. I am terrified. No one else notices the wave. Even the driver is indifferent. We approach an old inn on top of a mountain. The passengers leave the bus. I join them. I know I will have to go back and face the wave alone. The driver adds to my terror by reminding me, “Go soon. The wave will only get bigger.” I know I am going to have to go back and face the wave alone and I am terrified.

 

I had just spent an hour with my therapist telling her how much I hated myself. I told her I never did anything right. I told her I was a failure. I believed this although I had a full time job, was respected everywhere I went, had many friends. I had always been successful but I knew I was a complete failure. I left the office and drove home, shaken by the depth of self-loathing I had laid bare. I was on the San Diego freeway driving sixty miles an hour and a door opened in that wall and I walked through. I had seen the wall before but it never had a door. This time there was an open door and I walked through.

 

I can’t understand capital gains taxes, income taxes, investments or annuities, second mortgages, escrow instructions or deeds of trust. I don’t know when to get my car repaired or what work has to be done on it. I want to trust my mechanic, my lawyer, my accountant, but they might not be right. I have to get many opinions on everything. I don’t have time.

I have to work all day and work at night, be available to my child, be available to my friends. I have to have time to write, go out and have a good time, relax. There is never enough time. I have to get over this pain.

 

The light in my dining room won’t go on. I don’t know how to fix it. My garbage disposal has to be replaced. I don’t know which brand to buy. My car jerks and starts. I blame it on my moods but finally have to consult a mechanic. I pay a great deal of money to two mechanics and my car continues to jerk and I continue to blame it on my moods.

I cannot balance my checkbook. I have to buy a life insurance policy. I have to take care of my son’s future. I have to include every detail in the divorce agreement or I will get cheated. I have to take care of myself. Eleven years of marriage have prepared me to take care of others. I do not know how to take care of myself.

My head tells me, “I can’t do it” all the time. I hear it while I work, drive my car, shop for food, read, and write. The noise of “I can’t” fills the entire upper portion of my skull, drowning out any sound of music, comfort, pleasant memories, plans for the future. My head tells me all the things I cannot do. It never once says, “I can.”

My married friends ask, “What happens when your car breaks down? How do you get it fixed?” “Isn’t it hard to find babysitters all the time?” “What happens when your sink gets clogged up?” What they’re really saying is, “How do you live without a man?” A man to do for you what you cannot do yourself, make the decisions, fix things. A man, the man, the one we dreamed of, played house with in our imaginations, dated, and dated, and dated again until we married him. The one we could trust instead of the mechanic, the lawyer, the accountant. The one we could trust instead of ourselves.

When my married friends ask, “What do you do when your toilet gets clogged up?” I tell them, “None of it matters, not the car or the babysitter or the clogged up drains. I fix it myself or I call someone else to fix it.” I do not tell them the only thing that bothers me is my head. I have not found a repair-person for my head.

I was on the San Diego freeway driving sixty miles an hour and a door opened in that wall and I walked through. I had seen the wall before but it never had a door. This time there was an open door and I walked through.

The Earthquake

Sometimes there is an experience so profound you never understand it. As you live it, it seems ordinary. You enjoy yourself, but it seems little different from other times.

Later, as you reflect on it, the significance grows. You don’t know why but it becomes a symbol for your life, a mantra, and you can’t let it go and it brings you up or takes you down, but it’s in your thoughts all the time.

You see double images as you talk to people. They wear two faces at once. They are who they are. They are part of the experience that has you in its grip and won’t let you go. You cling to it out of insecurity, out of desire, out of desperation. The clinging satisfies nothing but you do it anyway and it’s like that for a long time. Peru was like that for me.

 

It was my first summer without a husband. My friend Lenore said, “I’m going to Peru in August. Why don’t you come with me?” I said, “I’ll think about it.” And then it became very easy. My son was going to be away. I had saved some money. My husband and I had been arguing all summer about the divorce agreement. I was getting weaker in the process.

We went to Peru to visit a friend of Lenore’s — a man she had met in an airport the year before. She went to visit a man she loved. I went to see Peru to have someplace to go.

 

Nothing could live on those streets. They are too narrow, too dirty, full of the saddest stories I ever heard:

I left my land to find work and now my children are dying. Every day I struggle to feed my children and it gets harder and harder. First the meat is gone then the fish now the chicken and the beans. There is no water. My house is four crumbling walls on land that is not mine. I have no home. I cannot feed my children.

I meet them on the streets, in the bombed out buildings. They march through the city carrying signs. Every day a new group. Miners. Newspaper workers. Civil servants. Hospital employees. Teachers. They march to keep their jobs, to make a living wage. How different than when I went out on strike, eight days over language in the contract. They march to stay alive.

They knew a better life once. They were part of the earth but they couldn’t live on what they grew. They left the land and went to the city. But there are no jobs. Food costs too much. First one sole for an orange then three. By the end of the year it is ten. They have nowhere to live. They come from the land but have no share in its wealth. Control lies in office buildings in Lima, New York, Tokyo. Their house has been destroyed by an earthquake so vicious there is no hope of ever going back.

How do these people survive? What is it that keeps them alive in the midst of all that suffering?

 

Six adults become my family. Three men. Three women. We gather together in the small apartment, drink Pisco, wine, beer, strong Peruvian coffee dripped slowly into a metal pot. We eat fresh rolls three dozen at a time and salty cheese trucked in from the villages. We sit around a table in a small apartment, unfinished concrete walls, bare concrete floor. The kitchen has no ceiling.

We gather around the table every morning, every evening, and laugh, sing, talk very fast, all at once. Sometimes someone cries.

There is a man there I love, when I listen to his stories — the ones I always wanted to hear. How it was in Chile during Allende. When the revolution will come in Peru. How it feels to be a man alone in the world. He quotes Latin American poets. And through every night he holds me.

And so these people become my people. This man becomes mine. The eucalyptus trees, the trees that grow so tall and so fast in the thin air of the Andes, become my trees. And I wonder that all this can take place in two weeks.

 

I return to my home in the suburbs and nothing is right. I don’t want to be there anymore. I want to leave my son. I want to move to Los Angeles, New York, or Spain. I want to return to Peru.

I don’t like what I see around me: people with big cars, four bedroom houses and mobile homes and closets full of clothes. I don’t want to know I am one of the people who have so much in a world of people who have so little.

I wander through the large rooms of my house and see the shacks I just left. I look at the wide green spaces, the parks, the lawns and see instead the bombed out streets. I stay in bed for days crying. When I finally feel stronger I go back to work. But I do not belong there anymore either. After fifteen years I don’t belong with teenagers, in a suburban schoolroom. It is not my job to tell people what to learn, how to behave. I look at the room full of students and see the family I left 5000 miles away, and I never lose the feeling that I am in the wrong place.

I spend the winter alone in my big house. The large windows and high ceilings make the rooms impossible to heat. My son lives with me but I hardly notice him. I read Spanish newspapers, import Peruvian weavings, write a story based on my experience that I never send out for publication. I am very cold all the time. I spend most of my time thinking of Peru, wanting to be there, looking for another place to be than where I am, looking for a way out, working every day, writing on the weekends and late at night. The longing and the cold never go away. I begin a new romance. He says my hands are always cold. I don’t tell him why.

I begin to dream of earthquakes.

 

An earthquake destroys an old hotel. A Mexican family inside goes down with the building. I stand and watch.

 

There is no natural disaster as great as the earthquake. Fires leave charred timbers. Hurricanes level trees and houses, leaving tree limbs and boards scattered in all directions. Floods twist railroad ties, until they look like just so much abstract sculpture.

The devastation is like nothing else. The ground opens and small children plunge downward to the earth’s core. Steel and glass skyscrapers crumble inward toward the center. Tidal waves pound shorelines all over the world. And there are aftershocks so that what appears to be over goes on and on. Sometimes the shocks are as bad as the original quake. The destruction doesn’t stop until all the china, all the glassware, all the clocks and vases on all the shelves are part of the wreckage of the house, smashed beyond repair lying along with the broken beams and crumbled walls on the buckled floor.

And when the earthquake is inside you, where does the body show the damage? How does the body repair? And when is it over?

Holy Ground

When the earthquake stops I want Indians. I am hungry for people who don’t wear clothes, who have brown skins, who nurse their babies under the warm sun, speak of dreams, pound manioc or grind corn, walk on dirt with bare feet.

Today I long for everything I do not have. What I never had. What I had and lost. A home, a family, another child, fresh earth, years of early mornings in my garden, the smell of roses and magnolias and ginger, all my friends with me at once. And to be alone, for a long time so I can sort things out, so I can finish one thing, really finish it before I start another, so that I have clean breaks instead of the trailing edges of Japanese kites.

I feel a loneliness like no other I ever felt before. It makes a hollow place inside me. Long ago I found liquor cannot fill that place. Food, work, an hour with my son do not fill it either. I always return to the loneliness and the fear. The fear tells me the loneliness will never go away, that I am not good enough, haven’t lived the right way to ever share my life with anyone, ever find the work I love. The fear is part of the loneliness and it makes it worse. The loneliness says, Today. The fear says, Forever.

The loneliness is the place that was never filled by my child, or my home, or my husband sleeping next to me. The safe place that comes along by chance fills it but that is a place I have had only for an afternoon, a day. Once in my life I lived there for two weeks and leaving it was unbearable.

My husband used to laugh at me when I would say, “The heat is unbearable. The pain is unbearable.” He laughed and said, “Nothing is unbearable. You’re bearing it, aren’t you?” And I’d agree. Yes, I was. And I was quiet, I didn’t complain anymore. But I knew it was unbearable. Too much to feel if I really came in contact with it. Too much for a human being to hold if she really came in contact with the pain.

The only reason for a wall is to stand against it when there is nowhere left to run. Breathe against it; let it wrap its arms around you.

When I name the loneliness I can read poetry to it, write a story about it. I can put coffee on the stove on a cold grey afternoon and spread my hands and face over the flame so the warmth heats me and touches the empty place inside me and for a moment it is enough.

This is the loneliness that makes me moan for release, the loneliness I have always feared, built walls against. This is the most profound loneliness I have ever known and this is the loneliness I crave.

 

September, 1979. Tonight is the last night I will spend in this house. I am alone with just the walls and the plants and the cool evening air. I am making love to these walls, the white plaster, like the cliff walls, the canyon walls, the walls that gave me strength.

Walls give me strength. I never understood that before. The wall of water I knew would crush me. It never did. I became stronger when I went to meet it. The walls of my home. Cantaloupe-colored. They sheltered me, embraced me, supported me, made me whole. The walls. I caressed each one lovingly. I said the walls made me crazy but even as I peeled the paper, steamed it off, I loved the smell of the steamer, like a London subway station. I peeled the paper off in long sheets or tiny bits, scraping at every bit. The best part was the sanding. I sanded every inch of every wall. Every corner. Even the highest part near the rafters. I sanded the walls white and smooth, pressed my hands against the walls, spread my fingers out for support, controlled the heavy sander. Up down around the wall, smoothing out the rough places, letting my arms follow the contour of the walls. To anyone else they were flat but to me they were curved, white, warm. I felt every groove, pressed my face, my arms, my breasts, against the walls.

Later I said the walls made me crazy, recognizing even then there was some power there. But the walls didn’t make me crazy. They made me well.

The summer before I left him, there were the walls of the Grand Canyon — pink, salmon-beige, gray-brown. Light on the canyon walls changes color so that a tan wall in the morning becomes pink in the afternoon and brown at dusk. I never saw the changes because we drifted down the river, not staying in one place very long, but I knew what happened. I drifted for days between the walls, and knew every inch of them and made love to them in my memory. Powell and the Havasupai Indians had been there before me but I claimed them for my own.

Later in the summer more walls. The cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde. White stone walls carved out of the cliffs. What would it be like to live inside those walls, alone? Did the Anasazi artists get a room of their own overlooking the canyon far below, a large room with a view where they could curl up in a corner and write or peer out over the edge of the canyon and dream? What would Anasazi artists dream of? With those walls they had everything.

A friend told me how walls are put up in apartment houses. These are not real walls; they are thin sheets of fiber over wooden ribs, not meant to last. They can be moved away, taken down, put up again, they are imitations of walls.

Walls in Japan are membranes. Within them people can hear each other talk, laugh, make love, but they pretend they cannot. They pretend they do not know what is going on. They know too much. They have to put up walls to keep the knowledge from themselves.

The only use for a wall is to paint on it, to make it holy, to write a poem or draw an intricate design or paint a portrait of beautiful women, a freedom fighter or an anonymous child.

The only reason for a wall is to stand against it when there is nowhere left to run. Breathe against it; let it wrap its arms around you. Face the wall full on. Let it love you. Crumble against it, kneeling at its base, and cry against it. And then turn and walk away, in a new direction, or back along the same path to pick up what you lost, or through the doorway that opens in it unexpectedly. When there is nothing else there is the wall.